Hike announces partnership with Airtel Payments Bank to power its Wallet

TT Correspondent | | 23 Nov 2017

Hike, on Wednesday announced a partnership with Airtel Payments Bank to power its Wallet. The alliance, a first of its kind, creates great business synergy between the two partners - Hike, one of India’s biggest internet startups with over a 100 million registered users, and Airtel Payments Bank with expertise in payments, wide merchant network, banking systems and strong KYC infrastructure. Hike Wallet crossed 5M+ transactions in Nov’17, growing by over 30% month-on-month.

Through this partnership, Airtel Payments Bank gets access to over 100M users on Hike and will begin powering the Hike Wallet product. Hike users will have access to Airtel Payments Bank’s vast product line including merchant and utility payments, KYC infrastructure, which is one of the largest in the country, giving a big boost to the platform in light of the recent KYC guidelines announced by RBI.

“We’ve seen tremendous traction on the Wallet over the last few months, most of it being organic. We’re on track for 5M+ transactions this month with only a simple set of services such as Recharge & P2P. As we scale up the number of services on our platform in the coming months, we expect this to grow even faster. In light of the new KYC guidelines, we’re also excited to announced a new partnership with Airtel Payments Bank. This is a great move for our users and it will ensure that they have an uninterrupted service when the new guidelines kick in. We’re excited and we look forward to working with Airtel on supporting this effort to bring more Indians online and enable easy transactional services for them,” said Pathik Shah, VP, Product at Hike Messenger.

“We are delighted to partner with Hike to build a world-class digital payments ecosystem by leveraging our vast reach and digital banking infrastructure. The addition of Hike Wallets to our portfolio will position us as one of the largest digital payments platforms in India,” said A Ganesh, Chief Operating Officer, Airtel Payments Bank.